I whistled and rattled on, perfectly charmed to be again under the influence of that wife-slayer's magic smile or his potent frown—it was all the same to me.
"I simply don't know," answered Jim. "I can't tell you. I don't know, Ben. I am easily led by Gabrielle. I was weak. Had I insisted upon seeing you from the first, no matter what happened—but there, let it pass. I asked your help with her father. There I made a bad mistake. You did something—I don't know what it was exactly, but you put your foot 'way down in—you upset me from the first. But let it pass. I'll take all you can give me to eat and then we'll go at the thing again; not where we left off the night we parted at the flat, but where we stand now. Gabrielle, too, has forsaken me, Ben." He looked at me with his mouth drawn down, his pinched face betraying surrender, his heavy eyes burdened with care.
"Forsaken you! How so? Was she not with you at the hospital?"
"Those letters to the Brown girl, in Thirty-eighth Street, are at the bottom of it, Ben. I told you they would come back, if you wrote so much. Those letters have ruined me—ruined me with the one woman I have loved. The other women—those to whom you wrote, you induced me to fool. Don't you see you did, Ben? Those letters you signed my name to, and gushed your poetry into like a stream from a fire-hose, swept me off; all the women you wrote to thought they were crazy letters, Ben. I never dared tell you that; but they all put me down for a fool, and as I had no particular interest in them I took the blame, Ben. I never supposed the letters could reach Gabrielle. I had them all in my bureau drawer when the fire started. I forgot to burn them—just chucked them in there when I got them back from Miss Brown. There must have been over a hundred. And, blowed if you didn't work in a lot of my hair! Egad, you must have clipped it when I fell asleep listening to you read them. I have heard them read since, too, at the hospital. Our nurse read one very prettily, and then I thought my hour had come—"
"Our nurse read them! My nurse in your room, too?"
"Yes. We had the same nurse."
"Sit up and have some pork and beans and a cup of coffee, Jim," said I. I could see then that there was no need to go into too many particulars. I did not care to go much further till I had collected some definite thoughts and arranged to conceal the amount of cash my wisdom had seen fit to call forth from my bank account for a lot of old junk that had been stored in Jim Hosley's bureau, and had fallen down to the next floor when the fire took place—just the spot the detectives wanted it to land precisely, in order to connect me with the case. It would not have surprised me to learn that Smith and Obreeon, his partner (for I could plainly see he was), had started that fire with full knowledge of the location of those letters and the exact spot they would fall if a match were touched to our abode at the proper time. My handwriting in the Tescheron messages had given me away.
"What do you think of those beans, Jim?"
"I think they taste more like home than anything I have met since I took that bath."
"There, don't say another word, Jim. I won't accuse you of anything. You had your bath, and both of us have enjoyed the sweat it produced. When we come out of this thing we'll be the purest mortals that ever took a course in practical morality over a hot stove as a starter. I told you about that quilt. So, that is the way it was, eh? Well, Jim, you certainly do know how to set a house afire, although I never believed you would set the world afire. I take it you will clip the ends pretty short when you start in to make quilts again for that purpose. But never mind, old boy, try another cup of this coffee."